Bits
by gveret
Summary: Anna wasn't the only one forced to grow up without a sister. And, more than anything, loneliness is a cold and quiet wound.
1. Chapter 1

Sometimes she notices shapes in the frost. They are never intentional, or at least not consciously so, and sometimes they mean nothing and couldn't even be described as _patterns_, exactly. But sometimes she notices them, regardless. Like suddenly spotting a unicorn riding a seal in the clouds or a laughing face in the leaves of a tree, only more personal somehow, because this is the ice that she made, from her own body, from her own mind.

She sees swirls like severed rose heads and spikes like the sharp and harmless teeth of a puppy. She sees the edges of teardrops and the corners of smiles. She wants to show it to Anna, sometimes (_always_), to ask what she finds there and remember and tease her about it. She wants to share it between them, because it's real and close and important, and because she misses her _voice_ so much.

"Do you want to build a snowman…"

It's not really a question anymore. Elsa can hear Anna's voice fade as she walks away before she's even finished asking.

Sometimes she traces the shapes with her fingertips, but her gloved hands leave no marks and her gloveless hands only make the ice thicker. Sometimes she wonders how a power that _creates_ so much can be so destructive.

But that is a wrongheaded line of thought, she knows. Her power is evil, unnatural, monstrous. It is to be denied, hidden, suppressed. The only thing it creates is pain and hurt and misery. And even if she wonders, even if she questions why a thing so evil feels so right, there is always, always, reliable and haunting as clockwork, that voice on the other side of the door, asking that same terrible question every time; a warning, a reminder.

"Do you want to build a snowman?"

.

When she doesn't read, about legislation and agriculture and economics, she writes, about laws and schedules and taxes. And when she doesn't do that, she does things she isn't allowed.

She blew on a cockroach, once, until it spread its wings encrusted with ice and flew away like a sparkling butterfly. She tapped her fingers on the windowsill until the tapping turned to clanging and she learned not to tap things, ever. She whispered words that curled like smoke and had to be careful, so careful, to make them dissipate and not let them drop in hard, sharp bunches.

She does it all inside her room, where no one can see and no one can be hurt, and it makes her so hollow with giddiness for a moment before she remembers her guilt and her shame. But when she does, and cloaks herself in them snugly, hopelessly, just as she should, it feels like suddenly she cannot separate the ice from the guilt and then both are impossible to tuck away.

"Fear will be your enemy," she remembers being told. But they must have been wrong. Her enemy is much simpler and more familiar than that, because her enemy is just herself.

.

She doesn't speak to herself, because she doesn't speak at all most of the time. But she does wonder about things.

She wonders what size shoes Anna is wearing, because she's been growing but it seems so long since Elsa's even seen her feet. She wonders if Anna still plays with dolls and climbs on inadvisable things and rates the palace guards by the impressiveness of their moustaches.

She wonders, idly and purposelessly, like all wondering must be done, and she tells herself stories about it and then tells herself to stop because it is childish and dangerous and it makes her feel almost _entitled_. And Anna's adventures are now and forever her own, and so are her delight and her disappointment and her big and little aches, and Elsa's entitled to none of it, _none_, not even to the telling.

But Anna still tells her. When she sits behind the door, whose every groove she must have already memorized, Elsa is certain, because Elsa herself has learned its every quirk on the other side. Anna sits there and tells her things, and not the things she wants to know; no, she sits there and tells her everything she doesn't want to hear.

"I found a cricket today, but I couldn't catch it. I think I forgot how. You taught me a lot of stuff that's easy to forget, Elsa, do you know that? You should remind me."

A rustle of clothes and the squeak of boots on marble. The shadow under the door squirms and evens.

"I did dance, though. You never even taught me how to dance, but, maybe that's why I remember."

A sigh.

"Do you want to build a…"

Elsa completes the sentence in her head, once, twice, a thousand times, compulsively and urgently and frantically like frost. Anna's footsteps down the corridor aren't reassuring or even disappointing; they are as familiar and predictable as the unfinished question that preceded them.

The pain is every bit as familiar and predictable, too.


	2. Chapter 2

When the frost leaks, it leaks out of everything. Out of her toes, out of her fingertips, out of her eye sockets, out of her ends and her corners and out of her very center. Out of the tiny spaces in the fabric of her gloves, and out of the tiny spaces in the fabric of her skin, maybe.

When the frost leaks, when she clutches her hands and her fear and everything she's feeling so close and so tight and it still _leaks_, and she has nothing but herself to try to hold it in with and her self is not enough, that's when Elsa knows – inside and out and sideways, too – that's when she _knows_ the true meaning of despair.

Despair is ice, creeping between her toes, coating her toenails and always climbing, climbing; greedy, ambitious. One day it will drown her, gentle and still, and she will make no sounds and no ripples as she goes.

"Don't feel," she commands.

"Don't feel," she begs.

"Don't feel," like that's even possible, like that will save her when her gloves are stiff and dripping and her sister is on the other side of her door and _pleading_.

"Be the good girl you always… never… was."

.

When her father comes to visit, it is always a relief and also a weight. She anticipates and dreads it in almost equal measures.

She doesn't hug him or hold his hand; he would like her to, she knows, but she would not allow it. Her touch is deadly enough from afar.

They talk, and sometimes she finds her voice strangely strained and stifled, and is reminded how little she really ever uses it.

They play, and her father has always been terrible at games (too stiff, too right, nothing at all like Anna) but, somehow, the air becomes lighter then, less dense, and eventually her father even stops shivering.

They recite and rehearse, and that's the part Elsa is most afraid of and most addicted to. They harmonize, perfectly, hermetically, beautifully, bleakly.

"Conceal…"

"Don't feel…"

"Don't…"

"_Ever_…"

"Let it…"

"Show."

.

Anna sits on her personal piece of floor on the other side of the door less and less often, of course. Even someone as hopeful and strong as she is fades and wilts eventually when faced with repeated rejection.

Not like the unwatered flowers in Elsa's room, no, nothing like them, because Elsa's flowers don't fade or wilt; they stand, tall and proud and glistening, up until the moment they shatter (or melt).

"I dreamed about you last night," Anna tells her, earnest and wonderful.

_I dream about you always._

"That you were laughing. Really laughing. With _me_. Ha!" It's bitter, the sound of Anna's laughter, and it's something Elsa never ever wants to hear. "Silly, isn't it?"

_No. No. Not silly at all. I'm so sorry, Anna._

"I wonder what you dream about in there. Do you even dream, when you have nothing to dream about but the same boring walls? Or maybe that just makes the dreams more interesting, huh. Don't you get sick of your walls?"

_I love my walls. I need them._

"I wish you'd…"

Anna doesn't finish, her only punctuation the muted thump as she leans her back or her head on Elsa's awful door.

And Elsa also wishes, but wishes are wild and powerful and wishes can be dangerous, wishes mustn't be articulated.

She presses her forehead to the door and the tip of her nose makes a little ring of frost where it bumps against it. On the other side, Anna sighs or maybe gasps, and Elsa wonders, slightly hopeful and slightly terrified, whether Anna can feel it, too.

.

Elsa doesn't dream of walls, or of doors, or of princes on white horses with giant flaming swords. Elsa dreams of things much more impossible and shameful, things she is absolutely horrified by and helplessly in love with.

She dreams of Anna, happy and glowing and pulling Elsa's hair; she dreams of her weak and terrifyingly pale and huddled around herself uselessly, because any warmth she ever had inside of her Elsa had already taken away.

She dreams of destruction and chaos and wonders and power and freedom, scary terrible forbidden _freedom_, and wakes up in cold sweat and laughing, laughing, laughing, and clenches her fists so hard she makes herself bleed with her own icicles.

She dreams of snowmen.

She dreams, and she hates it, and she wishes it would never stop.


	3. Chapter 3

When their parents die, she doesn't try to talk to Anna. She doesn't even consider it. She sees the depthless, formless pain inside of her, recognizes it, and she cannot bear the thought of adding to it, and making it bigger.

She stays locked in her room even more desperately and more completely than before. She eats when she gets dizzy and buries herself under so much of her snow that she rarely feels the urge to sleep, because she never really feels awake.

Anna's sobs on the other side of the door can barely be heard over the roar of her private wind, and the gossip of the servants has never reached her before anyway, and back then she didn't even have any slush plugging the keyhole.

But all of the snow melts once she finally passes out, and when she wakes up in a puddle, soaked down to her petticoat and shaking with something that cannot be cold, she has no choice but to acknowledge that she's been _grieving_ and it's been bad and that she has to stop.

She stuffs her hands in so many layers of gloves she can hardly bend her fingers and ties her hair so high and tight she loses feeling in her scalp. But it makes most of the frost go away, at least on the outside.

.

She takes over her parents' responsibilities gradually, in portions. First, only approving or denying requests and amendments sent to her by her advisors, which require only her signature and a dip by the royal seal. She always struggles with the wax, which tends to freeze over and flake off, naturally, instead of melting and softening as it would for any normal person with a candle.

But she learns to _breathe_, deep and slow and mindlessly, and she learns to bite the inside of her cheek, hard but shallow and invisible, and eventually the wax melts for her, too.

In time she is required to do things that cannot be done from inside her walls. The first time Elsa steps out of her room since the funeral, her lips tremble and she can feel her heartbeat in her fingertips, and she is sure she will paint her footsteps with ice and leave a slimy trail of snow behind her, like a snail, and turn all the bureaucrats to statues and freeze the jewels off the royal crown; but she doesn't. She can feel bits of ice form between her teeth, but when she smiles she keeps her mouth closed and no one notices.

The more time she spends outside of her room, the more impossible it becomes to avoid encountering Anna. The castle is very big, but so are the scope and breadth of her sister's restlessness, after all.

When it happens, Elsa bows her head and turns away, careful not to glance at Anna's face, careful not to glimpse her expression. Most of the time, Anna bows back, more deeply and nervously and using much more of her body than is necessary. And most of the time, she says nothing and does nothing more before continuing on her way, because Anna learns false lessons very slowly, but eventually she does learn. Most of the time, nothing else passes between them at all.

Most of the time.

But one time Anna bumps into her while running, accidentally and without even realizing, and for the rest of the day Elsa's left shoulder is encased in thick, thick ice, aching and immobilized, and it takes hours for her breath to recover.

.

The most important thing has always been to keep Anna safe. Elsa would happily carve out any one of her favorite organs if she thought it would help with that.

But sometime she thinks maybe, in all of that pain and regret and the unending struggle to sublimate herself, in all those years of hiding and isolation and unbelievable self-absorption, maybe she forgot to think about Anna's _happiness_, as well.

And seeing Anna now (even though Elsa is so, so careful not to look) she can't help wondering whether the protection of one led to the destruction of the other.

Weighed against each other like that, her safety and her happiness, even Elsa can't say for certain which is the more important to her. And Anna never even had the chance to choose.

.

Coronation Day is the day Elsa officially becomes Queen, the day she is forced to give up every single one of her defenses, the day she speaks to her sister for the first time since she almost made her _die_.

Coronation Day is the day Elsa finally realizes that Anna is indeed unhappy, and it is the day that she finally decides that happiness is probably more important than safety, and it is the day that she herself is finally stripped of that choice altogether.

It is the day she loses her gloves and the day she finds herself, and it is the most heartbreaking and exhilarating day of her life, every bit as terrifying and triumphant as any of her dreams.

She just wishes (_even though wishes are dangerous_) that she didn't also have to lose Anna again in the process.


End file.
